Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama. The family lived in the "Dynamite Hill" neighborhood, which was marked in the 1950s by the bombings of houses of middle-class blacks who had moved into the area. Davis occasionally spent time on her uncle's farm and with friends in New York City.[7] Her family included brothers Ben and Reginald and sister Fania. Ben played defensive back for the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[8]

Davis attended Carrie A. Tuggle School, a segregated black elementary school; later she attended Parker Annex, a middle-school branch of Parker High School in Birmingham. During this time Davis' mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a national officer and leading organizer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organization influenced by the Communist Party, which was trying to build alliances among African Americans in the South. Consequently, Davis grew up surrounded by communist organizers and thinkers who significantly influenced her intellectual development.[9]

Davis was involved in her church as a child, she was an active member in her church youth group and attended Sunday school regularly. Davis attributes much of her political involvement to her involvement with Girl Scouts of America, in Birmingham, as a young girl. She won many badges and certificates and went as far as to participate in Girl Scouts 1959 national round up in Colorado. As a Girl Scout she marched and picketed to protest racial segregation in Birmingham.[10]

During her second year at Brandeis, Davis decided to major in French and continued her intensive study of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Davis was accepted by the Hamilton College Junior Year in France Program. Classes were initially at Biarritz and later at the Sorbonne. In Paris, she and other students lived with a French family. She was in Biarritz when she learned of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, committed by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, in which four girls were killed. She was deeply grieved as she was personally acquainted with the young victims.[13]

Nearing completion of her degree in French, Davis realized her major interest was in philosophy instead. She became particularly interested in the ideas of Herbert Marcuse and, on her return to Brandeis, she sat in on his course. Marcuse, she wrote, turned out to be approachable and helpful. She began making plans to attend the University of Frankfurt for graduate work in philosophy. In 1965 she graduated magna cum laude, a member of Phi Beta Kappa.[13]

In Germany, with a stipend of $100 a month, she first lived with a German family. Later, she moved with a group of students into a loft in an old factory. After visiting East Berlin during the annual May Day celebration, she felt that the East German government was dealing better with the residual effects of fascism than were the West Germans. Many of her roommates were active in the radical Socialist German Student Union (SDS), and Davis participated in some SDS actions. Events in the United States, including the formation of the Black Panther Party and the transformation of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to an all-black organization, made her ready to return to the US.[13]

Marcuse had moved to a position at the University of California, San Diego, and Davis followed him there after her two years in Frankfurt.[13] On her way back, Davis stopped in London to attend a conference on "The Dialectics of Liberation." The black contingent at the conference included the Trinidadian-American Stokely Carmichael and the British Michael X. Although moved by Carmichael's rhetoric, she was reportedly disappointed by her colleagues' black nationalist sentiments and their rejection of communism as a "white man's thing."[14]

She joined the Che-Lumumba Club (an all-black branch of the Communist Party USA), named for international Communist sympathizers and leaders Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba.[15]

Davis earned her master's degree from UC-San Diego. She then earned her doctorate in philosophy from the Humboldt University in Communist East Berlin.[16]

The Regents released Davis again, on June 20, 1970, when they fired her for the "inflammatory language" she had used in four different speeches. "We deem particularly offensive", the report said, "such utterances as her statement that the regents 'killed, brutalized (and) murdered' the People's Park demonstrators, and her repeated characterizations of the police as 'pigs'".[20][21][22]

On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, a heavily armed, 17-year-old African-American high-school student, gained control over a courtroom in Marin County, California. Once in the courtroom, Jackson armed the black defendants and took Judge Harold Haley, the prosecutor, and three female jurors as hostages.[24][25] As Jackson transported the hostages and two black convicts away from the courtroom, the police began shooting at the vehicle. The judge and the three black men were killed in the melee; one of the jurors and the prosecutor were injured. The firearms which Jackson used in the attack, including the shotgun used to kill Judge Haley, had been purchased by Davis two days prior and the barrel of the shotgun had been sawn off.[25] Davis was found to have been corresponding with one of the inmates involved.[26]

As California considers "all persons concerned in the commission of a crime, whether they directly commit the act constituting the offense... principals in any crime so committed", Marin County Superior Judge Peter Allen Smith charged Davis with "aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley" and issued a warrant for her arrest. Hours after the judge issued the warrant on August 14, 1970, a massive attempt to locate and arrest Angela Davis began. On August 18, 1970, four days after the initial warrant was issued, the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover listed Davis as the third woman and the 309th person to appear on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List.[24][27]

Soon after, Davis became a fugitive and fled California. According to her autobiography, during this time she hid in friends' homes and moved at night. On October 13, 1970, FBI agents found her at a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in New York City.[28] President Richard M. Nixon congratulated the FBI on its "capture of the dangerous terrorist, Angela Davis."

On January 5, 1971, Davis appeared at the Marin County Superior Court and declared her innocence before the court and nation: "I now declare publicly before the court, before the people of this country that I am innocent of all charges which have been leveled against me by the state of California." John Abt, general counsel of the Communist Party USA, was one of the first attorneys to represent Davis for her alleged involvement in the shootings.[29]

While being held in the Women's Detention Center, Davis was initially segregated from other prisoners, in what she referred to as solitary confinement. With the help of her legal team, she obtained a federal court order to get out of the segregated area.[30]

Across the nation, thousands of people began organizing a movement to gain her release. In New York City, black writers formed a committee called the Black People in Defense of Angela Davis. By February 1971 more than 200 local committees in the United States, and 67 in foreign countries, worked to free Davis from prison. John Lennon and Yoko Ono contributed to this campaign with the song: "Angela"[31]" In 1972, after a sixteen-month incarceration, the state allowed her release on bail from county jail.[24] On February 23, 1972, Rodger McAfee, a dairy farmer from Fresno, California, paid her $100,000 bail with the help of Steve Sparacino, a wealthy business owner. Portions of her legal defense expenses were paid for by the United Presbyterian Church.[24][32]

A defense motion for a change of venue was granted and the trial was moved to Santa Clara County. On June 4, 1972, after three days of deliberations, the all-white jury returned a verdict of not guilty.[33] The fact that she owned the guns used in the crime was judged insufficient to establish her responsibility in the plot. She was represented by Leo Branton Jr., who hired psychologists to help the defense determine who in the jury pool might favor their arguments, a technique that has since become more common. He hired experts to discredit the reliability of eyewitness accounts.[34]

The first song released in favor of Davis was "Angela" (1971), written by Italian singer-songwriter and musician Virgilio Savona with his group (Quartetto Cetra). He received some anonymous threats.[35]

After her acquittal, Davis visited Cuba. She followed the precedents set by her fellow activistsRobert F. Williams, Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and Assata Shakur. Her reception by Afro-Cubans at a mass rally was so enthusiastic that she was reportedly barely able to speak.[38] Davis perceived Cuba to be a racism-free country, which led her to believe that "only under socialism could the fight against racism be successfully executed." When she returned to the United States, her socialist leanings increasingly influenced her understanding of race struggles.[39]

In the mid-1970s, Jim Jones, who developed the cult Peoples Temple, initiated friendships with progressive leaders in the San Francisco area including Dennis Banks and Davis.[41] On September 10, 1977, 14 months prior to the Temple's mass murder-suicide, Davis spoke via radio-phone dispatch to members of his Peoples Temple living in Guyana within Jonestown.[42][43] In her statement during the "Six Day Siege", she expressed support for the People's Temple anti-racism efforts and told members there was a conspiracy against them. She said that "when you are attacked, it is because of your progressive stand, and we feel that it is directly an attack against us as well."[44]

In a New York City speech on July 9, 1975, Russian dissident and Nobel LaureateAleksandr Solzhenitsyn told an AFL-CIO meeting that Davis was derelict in having failed to support prisoners in various socialist countries around the world, given her stark opposition to the US prison system. He claimed a group of Czech prisoners had appealed to Davis for support, which Solzhenitsyn said she had declined.[45] Solzhenitsyn's criticism of Davis was dismissed by Robert Knox[citation needed] and Alberto Toscano,[who?] who believed she was more credible regarding Eastern European Communism than he was.[46]

Davis has written several books. A principal focus of her current activism is the state of prisons within the United States. She considers herself an abolitionist, not a "prison reformer." She has referred to the United States prison system as the "Prison-industrial complex," aggravated by the establishment of privately run prisons.[56] Davis suggested focusing social efforts on education and building "engaged communities" to solve various social problems now handled through state punishment.[4]

Davis was one of the founders of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to building a movement to abolish the prison-industrial complex.[57] In recent works, she has argued that the prison system in the United States more closely resembles a new form of slavery than a criminal justice system. According to Davis, between the late 19th century and the mid-20th century, the number of prisons in the United States sharply increased but crime rates continued to rise. During this time, the racism in American society is demonstrated by the disproportionate share of the African-American population who are incarcerated. "What is effective or just about this "justice" system?" she urged people to question.[58]

As early as 1969, Davis began public speaking engagements. She expressed her opposition to the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and the prison-industrial complex, and her support of gay rights and other social justice movements. In 1969, she blamed imperialism for the troubles suffered by oppressed populations.

"We are facing a common enemy and that enemy is Yankee Imperialism, which is killing us both here and abroad. Now I think anyone who would try to separate those struggles, anyone who would say that in order to consolidate an anti-war movement, we have to leave all of these other outlying issues out of the picture, is playing right into the hands of the enemy", she declared.[59]

More than a generation later, in 2001 she publicly spoke against the war on terror following the 9/11 attacks, continued to criticize the prison-industrial complex, and discussed the broken immigration system. She said that if people wanted to solve social justice issues, they had to "hone their critical skills, develop them and implement them." Later, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she declared that the "horrendous situation in New Orleans" was due to the structures of racism, capitalism, and imperialism with which our leaders ran this country.[60]

In 2008, Davis participated as a keynote speaker at Vanderbilt University's conference, "Who Speaks for the Negro?".[65] She has visited the University twice since then; most recently she gave the Commemorative Murray Lecture on February 25, 2015, to talk with students in a fireside chat on college activism.[66]

On April 16, 2009, she was the keynote speaker at the University of VirginiaCarter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies symposium on The Problem of Punishment: Race, Inequity, and Justice.[67]

The National United Committee to Free Angela Davis is at the Main Library at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California (A collection of thousands of letters received by the Committee and Davis from people in the US and other countries.)

The complete transcript of her trial, including all appeals and legal memoranda, has been preserved in the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Library in Berkeley, California.

^"Advisory board". Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism website. Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. July 20, 2007. Archived from the original on July 9, 2007. Retrieved July 20, 2007.